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It's GDC week! Which means the Weekenders have serious FOMO. Rob is dealing with it by playing a ton of Burnout Paradise, one of the finest arcade racers ever produced. Danielle went to GDC for two days, and has the burned-out vocal cords to prove it.

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To Rob's point on Spec Ops: The Line being a commentary on modern action-war games rather than on actual war - The lead writer has refered to it as anti-heroic rather than anti-war, but I think that the game criticizes both the way media portrays war, and the narrative many soldiers actually see themselves as taking a part in. The comparison between the Far Cry games and Spec Ops: The Line is particularly interesting, as Both SO:TL and Far Cry 2 are loose adaptations of Heart of Darkness - which is a direct criticism of Imperialism and Militarism, and, as far as I can tell, never comments on how other books of the time presented these issues.

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I think the comparison was specifically to Far Cry 3, which as far as I know stands apart from the other Far Cry games in terms of it's particular form of moralism. Who decided that it was a good idea to keep the games as-is but then try to make you feel bad for playing them? "Yes, you're still murdering cyber-babes but you're doing it ironically! Care for a spot of tea?"

I hate to say it because I really liked aspects of the game, but the first example of this that I can recall is Bioshock. Here are quests for you to do, have fun! But woah huge twist, it turns out that you were being mind-controlled to perform those quests. Big fool you are for doing the only thing available in this game! What an amazingly deep commentary on video gaming. Then again, at least Bioshock didn't try to moralize that aspect of the experience. It was just presented as a narrative twist. Still, I almost quit playing at that point. Just... ugh.

If something is perceived as a problem in video game design, don't just do that thing and then point out how bad it is. Do a better thing instead and show everyone why that's cool.

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Oh man, Burnout Paradise was fantastic! Definitely the best time I have had with any racing game.

I also bought Need for Speed: Most Pursuit because it was developed by Criterion and looked super good at the time, but as Rob said, something was missing, and it wasn't nearly as fun as Burnout Paradise.

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Danielle and Rob's stories about "head down" gaming, where the game design detracts from enjoying the environment sparked a couple of thoughts.

Addressing this is part of the attraction of "walking simulators". Jonathan Blow's the Witness aggressively cuts against this heads down gaming by making the environment part of the game loop. Are there other games, the "I Spy" type object finders for example that make engaging with the environment part of the game?

The other, sadder, thought is that the kind of games that have the budget to make multiple eye-popping detailed environments with cohesive art direction in a reasonable timeframe are the ones where there is a lizard brain scratching, attention engaging loop, where you cannot afford the time to up arrow or terrible things will happen to the face of your avatar. The pile of money you have to make the game has to turn into a bigger pile of money after the game has been sold, and the largest disposable income demographic isn't demanding walking simulators. Can someone please tell me how I am wrong?

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Oh man, Burnout Paradise was fantastic! Definitely the best time I have had with any racing game.

I also bought Need for Speed: Most Pursuit because it was developed by Criterion and looked super good at the time, but as Rob said, something was missing, and it wasn't nearly as fun as Burnout Paradise.

My only issue with Burnout Paradise is that in order to win races you either need to play a ton so you learn the map really well by sight, or you need to pause the race periodically to check the in-game map to check your route. The game really needs a route planner that generates the route overlay we see in other games. And generally speaking on Burnout and N4S, the turn markers and such aren't obvious enough. They need to be bolder. Even in the latest game the majority of races I lose is because I missed a turn. Dynamic routing needs work as well. In Rivals, the routes chosen by the ad-hoc race generator are often screwed up. They send you the wrong way up highway exits, and if you miss these the rerouting just goes insane. Worse, the AI cars ignore the route line and pick their own, which is always the correct path to take. So it's not like that game doesn't know what we should be doing, it just isn't communicating this to the player.

One thing that can be said for the series is that every game changes a lot from the previous one. Most of these changes don't end up working out, but it's a lot nicer than if they were just releasing graphics updates and tiny refinements in order to keep the money rolling in. As far as the car wrecks are concerned, it's totally obvious what restrictions the car company imposed because every car reacts differently to damage. Some get properly banged up and others barely look scratched. I know it would mean more design work, but I'd love to go back to the time of made up cars so that we could blow them to bits as was possible in the early games.

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As far as taking the time to smell the roses, I came across an example of this when I rolled up a second character in the Division. Right after you switch over to Manhattan, before you've even hit that first hub (the one way in the bottom left of the map, not the Home Base across from MSG) there's a merry-go-round/carousel thing which is exquisitely rendered. I'm not sure I even noticed its existence at all passing by with my first character because I was in full on gung-ho 'show me where a dude i can shoot for my loot pinata is' mode.

edit: found a pic of it online. like look at that. someone modeled and textured it and I bet a lot of people like me barely registered it as being there (your intial pass through the area can occur at night time)

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My only issue with Burnout Paradise is that in order to win races you either need to play a ton so you learn the map really well by sight, or you need to pause the race periodically to check the in-game map to check your route. The game really needs a route planner that generates the route overlay we see in other games.

Yup, the lack of route indicators made some of the more traditional race type events a bit annoying at times. Definitely an interesting design choice.

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When Danielle and Rob were talking about a cartoony FPS my mind went straight to TF2 as it so often does. It does the silly cartoon quality so well, though I think in part that was because of how they gave all the classes personalities which you don't get very much in an FPS game.

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Rob's comments on the ability to make a game where (paraphrasing) "you can do awful things to people but it's far enough removed from reality to make it all right" made me immediately think of the comparison between Destiny and The Division. I feel fine shooting aliens that almost destroyed humanity with my space magic guns in Destiny (great), but I can't bring myself to play The Division where I'm gunning down looters in hoodies (ugh).

Edit: Framing, that's the term I was searching for while writing this. Good framing in Destiny makes the ultra violence enjoyable, bad framing in The Division keeps me from playing it. Thanks Aleryn.

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Have some more praise for the importance of framing on subject matter in games, especially violence. This sort of thing is why I stopped playing a lot of more popular triple-a stuff as I got older. It'd be nice to see more discussion of this as in the episode; comparing two games of similar actions but the framing making such a difference. And of course, people can have their ultra violence, it's just not for every one. *boots up DooM

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Please play Spec Ops: The Line and have Brendan Keogh on the podcast! That game is really smart and Killing is Harmless is a brilliant piece of writing. I think Spec Ops succeeds at going beyond just criticizing the player for shooting people.

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Yeah, I feel I've posted about it a bunch, but I totally agree with Fog's interpretation, in that it's about the implications of the type of "war media" people consume rather than just scolding you for video games. I think it came up in a Thumbs episode, where they weren't super taken with it. I really like it. Definitely one of those games that I think you need to play on harder levels so it's pushing back a little. It's also been mentioned before in other threads, but in terms of PTSD elements, the slow change in the games barks from "flank right, hold position" to "kill that fucking fucker" is slow and well done.

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Regarding taking time to slow down and appreciate the world of the game, I think Dark Souls deserves a mention here for two reasons. One is that, because the map is more or less continuous, about 90% of the time if you notice something cool in the distance that's someplace you'll be later in the game, so there's actually a tiny but significant bit of gameplay reason to be paying attention to the environment. The other is that the messaging system actually has a message just to say 'glorious view' which, when not being used for saucy jokes, can actually often make one take a moment to look around and say "you know what? Yeah. That is nice."

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A friend of mine asked if I wanted to roleplay in The Division recently and so I and a few other people basically hung out in an apartment for an hour or so. It was really weird and really interesting to look at the contents of an ARPG from the perspective of someone who might conceivably be living in that world. I spent a while just looking at the art on the walls, along with a ton of other stuff people normally ignore in their rush to the to the glowing loot chest. I think I'm going take time out now and then to do this some more.

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A friend of mine asked if I wanted to roleplay in The Division recently and so I and a few other people basically hung out in an apartment for an hour or so. It was really weird and really interesting to look at the contents of an ARPG from the perspective of someone who might conceivably be living in that world. I spent a while just looking at the art on the walls, along with a ton of other stuff people normally ignore in their rush to the to the glowing loot chest. I think I'm going take time out now and then to do this some more.

I've been grabbing all the intel collectibles in the game because I'm OCD like that and there really is a TON of stuff going on in that game outside of the core shoot dudes-get-loot loop. It's not all handled with deftness (there's a lot of menacing-graffiti-messages style "environmental design"), but there are a few neat short stories in among all the grimdark worldbuilding, plus the whole ECHO system is in many ways what I imagine the core conceit of Return of the Obra Dinn looks like when AAA gets its hands on it. For all that the division's a cynical skinner box of a game, I definitely get the sense that people cared a great deal about individual bits and pieces of it even if it never hangs together.

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I hadn't heard of S and it's awesome. Thanks! I actually picked up Ken Hite's Dracula Dossier recently because the material includes an annotated copy of Stoker's Dracula, "Dracula Unredacted". The basic premise is that the original version of Dracula was an after action report about an attempt to recruit the actual real Dracula as a black ops agent, which was later redacted and released to the public as disinformation. That story within a story thing fascinates me, and in the case of Dracula Unredacted, is a way to make a well known story fresh and interesting again.